Making Money On-line: Remarketing Best Practices from Elizabeth Marsten of CommerceHub

Monday 27 June 2016

Remarketing Best Practices from Elizabeth Marsten of CommerceHub

Remarketing-Tips-CommerceHub

Over the past few years, online remarketing has transitioned into a no brainer practice in digital advertising; and for good reason. Typically associated with lower cost-per-lead and higher return on ad spend, remarketing has caught the eye of businesses and agencies alike.

At last week’s 2016 MNSearch Summit, Director of Paid Search at CommerceHub Elizabeth Marsten presented her session titled “Make Your Remarketing More than an Echo,” to a packed room of marketing professionals looking to learn how to make the most of their remarketing efforts.

In her quick-witted and authentically expert presentation, she blazed through the history of remarketing and best practices for Google and Facebook remarketing (almost faster than I could type!).

Why Remarketing is Essential to Paid Search

Marsten opened with a short history on how remarketing has been used for over 100 years and why it’s evolved to such an essential piece of the paid search industry. According to Marsten, the idea of remarketing was noted as far back as 1885 by a man named Thomas Smith who published an article stating that it typically takes 20 interactions with a potential customer before they buy something. In the 1930s, the movie industry based their film advertising strategies around the theory that the magic number was 7.

In 2016, marketers have turned from in-person remarketing to digital remarketing. Why? Because digital remarketing allows marketers to weave customer data and automatic campaign controls to achieve more efficient results with:

Average CPC/CPA
Segmentation
Removal and suppression

Google Remarketing Best Practices

With her over 10 years of digital marketing experience, Marsten offered best practices that every marketer should consider while executing a remarketing strategy on Google AdWords:

Don’t be afraid to use custom audiences or Smart Lists
Use frequency capping
Separate campaigns for text and image ads
Test multiple ad layouts
Watch out for defaults: US & Canada (don’t want), Enhanced CPC (typically better off without it), optimized for conversions (you want this!)
Don’t forget to check box for dynamic ads

Remarketing audience segmentation is both an art and a science. Marsten also provided several segmentation ideas that her team has proven to be most effective at helping to meet their remarketing objectives:

Segment audiences by abandoned cart amount and utilize ideal price points. You’re probably going to want to bid differently for someone that ditches a $500 cart versus a $10 cart.
Set target CPAs for each audience. Or at the very least a different CPA for remarketing overall because there is likely a different acceptable CPA based on the how the customer has engaged with the brand already.
Layer on demographic and interests. This will narrow automatic placements with larger lists like “all site visitors”.

Elizabeth Marsten took the complex world of remarketing and shared her top takeaways from her years of experience. What do you think are the biggest remarketing opportunities for your brand?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.